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For reasons that will baffle my many detractors, I am often asked for advice about being an opinion journalist. One of my standard responses is: You have to be willing to disappoint your biggest fans.

What I mean is that if you start to see your job as telling fans what they want to hear, you risk becoming an entertainer rather than a thinker, and eventually you become a caricature. I’ve seen it happen numerous times. Patrick Buchanan was a brilliant columnist and a serious person. But over the course of his career, he listened too much to the people who said, “Go Pat, go!” and too little to friends who said, “I think that’s taking it too far.”

In journalism — or what passes for it — you can see the same arc most acutely in talk radio and TV hosts, who define their roles as telling the audience what it wants to hear rather than what it needs to hear. In the early Trump era, many prominent pundits were fairly conventional conservatives. When the audience veered towards populism and MAGA, the hosts followed the advice widely attributed to the French 19th century politician, Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin: “There go the people, I must follow them, for I am their leader.” (In fairness, he didn’t say it, critics ascribed it to him.)

But the most dangerous realm for this dynamic isn’t political journalism. It’s politics. Politicians often are captured by their true-believing base. It’s most commonly seen among “conviction” politicians, who make a name for themselves on a single issue or idea. Congressman and Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan’s deep populist........

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